by Thomas Hardy
The earliest recollection of his childhood (as he had told me before) was that when he was four years old his father gave him a small toy concertina and wrote on it, ‘Thomas Hardy, 1844’. By this inscription he knew, in after years, his age when that happened.
Also he remembered, perhaps a little later than this, being in the garden at Bockhampton with his father on a bitterly cold winter day. They noticed a fieldfare, half-frozen, and the father took up a stone idly and threw it at the bird, possibly not meaning to hit it. The fieldfare fell dead, and the child Thomas picked it up and it was as light as a feather, all skin and bone, practically starved. He said he had never forgotten how the body of the fieldfare felt in his hand: the memory had always haunted him.
He recalled how, crossing the eweleaze when a child, he went on hands and knees and pretended to eat grass in order to see what the sheep would do. Presently he looked up and found them gathered around in a close ring, gazing at him with astonished faces.
An illness, which at the commencement did not seem to be serious, began on December 11. On the morning of that day he sat at the writing-table in his study, and felt totally unable to work. This, he said, was the first time that such a thing had happened to him.
From then his strength waned daily. He was anxious that a poem he had written, ‘Christmas in the Elgin Room’, should be copied and sent to The Times. This was done, and he asked his wife anxiously whether she had posted it with her own hands. When she assured him that she had done so he seemed content, and said he was glad that he had cleared everything up. Two days later he received a personal letter of thanks, with a warm appreciation of his work, from the editor of The Times. This gave him pleasure, and he asked that a reply should be sent.
He continued to come downstairs to sit for a few hours daily, until Christmas Day. After that he came downstairs no more.
On December 26 he said that he had been thinking of the Nativity and of the Massacre of the Innocents, and his wife read to him the gospel accounts, and also articles in the Encyclopedia Biblica. He remarked that there was not a grain of evidence that the gospel story was true in any detail.
As the year ended a window in the dressing-room adjoining his bedroom was opened that he might hear the bells, as that had always pleased him. But now he said that he could not hear them, and did not seem interested.
His strength still failed. The weather was bitterly cold, and snow had fallen heavily, being twelve inches deep in parts of the garden. In the road outside there were snow-drifts that in places would reach a man’s waist.
By desire of the local practitioner additional advice was called in, and Hardy’s friend Sir Henry Head, who was living in the neighbourhood, made invaluable suggestions and kept a watchful eye upon the case. But the weakness increased daily.
He could no longer listen to the reading of prose, though a short poem now and again interested him. In the middle of one night he asked his wife to read aloud to him ‘The Listeners’, by Walter de la Mare.
On January 10 he made a strong rally, and although he was implored not to do so he insisted upon writing a cheque for his subscription to the Pension Fund of the Society of Authors. For the first time in his life he made a slightly feeble signature, unlike his usual beautiful firm handwriting, and then he laid down his pen.
Later he was interested to learn that J. M. Barrie, his friend of many years, had arrived from London to assist in any way that might be possible. He was amused when told that this visitor had gone to the kitchen door to avoid any disturbance by ringing the front-door bell.
In the evening he asked that Robert Browning’s poem ‘Rabbi Ben Ezra’ should be read aloud to him. While reading it his wife glanced at his face to see whether he were tired, the poem being a long one of thirty-two stanzas, and she was struck by the look of wistful intentness with which Hardy was listening. He indicated that he wished to hear the poem to the end.
He had a better night, and in the morning of January 11 seemed so much stronger that one at least of those who watched beside him had confident hopes of his recovery, and an atmosphere of joy prevailed in the sick-room. An immense bunch of grapes arrived from London, sent by a friend, and this aroused in Hardy great interest. As a rule he disliked receiving gifts, but on this occasion he showed an almost childlike pleasure, and insisted upon the grapes being held up for the inspection of the doctor, and whoever came into the room. He ate some, and said quite gaily, ‘I’m going on with these’. Everything he had that day in the way of food or drink he seemed to appreciate keenly, though naturally he took but little. As it grew dusk, after a long musing silence, he asked his wife to repeat to him a verse from the Rubiiyit of Omar Khayydm, beginning
Oh, Thou, who Man of baser Earth —
She took his copy of this work from his bedside and read to him:
Oh, Thou, who Man of baser Earth didst make,
And ev’n with Paradise devise the Snake:
For all the Sin wherewith the Face of Man Is blacken’d —
Man’s forgiveness give — and take!
He indicated that he wished no more to be read.
In the evening he had a sharp heart attack of a kind he had never had before. The doctor was summoned and came quickly, joining Mrs. Hardy at the bedside. Hardy remained conscious until a few minutes before the end. Shortly after nine he died.
An hour later one, going to his bedside yet again, saw on the death-face an expression such as she had never seen before on any being, or indeed on any presentment of the human countenance. It was a look of radiant triumph such as imagination could never have conceived. Later the first radiance passed away, but dignity and peace remained as long as eyes could see the mortal features of Thomas Hardy.
The dawn of the following day rose in almost unparalleled splendour. Flaming and magnificent the sky stretched its banners over the dark pines that stood sentinel around.
APPENDIX I
On the morning of Thursday, January 12, the Dean of Westminster readily gave his consent to a proposal that Hardy should be buried in Westminster Abbey; and news of this proposal and its acceptance was sent to Max Gate. There it was well known that Hardy’s own wish was to be buried at Stinsford, amid the graves of his ancestors and of his first wife. After much consideration a compromise was found between this definite personal wish and the nation’s claim to the ashes of the great poet. On Friday, January 13, his heart was taken out of his body and placed by itself in a casket. On Saturday, January 14, the body was sent to Woking for cremation, and thence the ashes were taken the same day to Westminster Abbey and placed in the Chapel of St. Faith to await interment. On Sunday, January 15, the casket containing the heart was taken to the church at Stinsford, where it was laid on the altar steps.
At two o’clock on Monday, January 16, there were three services in three different churches. In Westminster Abbey the poet’s wife and sister were the chief mourners, while in the presence of a great crowd, which included representatives of the King and other members of the Royal Family, and of many learned and other societies, the ashes of Thomas Hardy were buried with stately ceremonial in Poets’ Corner. The pall-bearers were the Prime Minister (Mr. Stanley Baldwin) and Mr. Ramsay MacDonald, representing the Government and Parliament; Sir James Barrie, Mr. John Galsworthy, Sir Edmund Gosse, Professor A. E. Housman, Mr. Rudyard Kipling, and Mr. Bernard Shaw, representing literature; and the Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge (Mr. A. S. Ramsey), and the Pro-Provost of Queen’s College, Oxford (Dr. E. M. Walker), representing the Colleges of which Hardy was an honourary Fellow. A spadeful of Dorset earth, sent by a Dorset farm labourer, Mr. Christopher Corbin, was sprinkled on the casket. In spite of the cold and wet the streets about the Abbey were full of people who had been unable to obtain admission to the service, but came as near as they might to taking part in it. At the same hour at Stinsford, where Hardy was baptized, and where as boy and man he had often worshipped, his brother,
Mr. Henry Hardy, was the chief mourner, while, in the presence of a rura
l population, the heart of this lover of rural Wessex was buried in the grave of his first wife among the Hardy tombs under the great yew-tree in the corner of the churchyard. And in Dorchester all business was suspended for an hour, while at St. Peter’s Church the Mayor and Corporation and many other dignitaries and societies attended a memorial service in which the whole neighbourhood joined.H. C.
APPENDIX II
Letters from Thomas Hardy to Dr. Caleb Saleeby I
Max Gate, Dorchester, Dec. 21, 1914.
Dear Sir,
I have read with much interest the lecture on The Longest Price of War that you kindly send: and its perusal does not diminish the gloom with which this ghastly business on the Continent fills me, as it fills so many. The argument would seem to favour Conscription, since the inert, if not the unhealthy, would be taken, I imagine.
Your visits to The Dynasts show that, as Granville-Barker foretold, thoughtful people would care about it. My own opinion when I saw it was that it was the only sort of thing likely to take persons of musing turn into a theatre at this time.
I have not read M. Bergson’s book, and if you should not find it troublesome to send your copy as you suggest, please do.
The theory of the Prime Force that I used in The Dynasts was published in Jan. 1904. The nature of the determination embraced in the theory is that of a collective will; so that there is a proportion of the total will in each part of the whole, and each part has therefore, in strictness, some freedom, which would, in fact, be operative as such whenever the remaining great mass of will in the universe should happen to be in equilibrium.
However, as the work is intended to be a poetic drama and not a philosophic treatise I did not feel bound to develop this.
The assumption of unconsciousness in the driving force is, of course, not new. But I think the view of the unconscious force as gradually becoming conscious: i.e. that consciousness is creeping further and further back towards th° origin of force, had never (so far as I know) been advanced before The Dynasts appeared. But being only a mere impressionist I must not pretend to be a philosopher in a letter, and ask you to believe me,
Sincerely yours,
Thomas Hardy.
Dr. Saleeby.
2
Max Gate, Dorchester, Feb. 2, 1915.
Dear Dr. Saleeby,
Your activities are unlimited. I should like to hear your address on ‘Our War for International Law’. Personally I feel rather disheartened when I think it probable that the war will end by sheer exhaustion of the combatants, and that things will be left much as they were before. But I hope not.
I have been now and then dipping into your Bergson, and shall be returning the volume soon. I suppose I may assume that you are more or less disciple, or fellow-philosopher, of his. Therefore you may be rather shocked by some views I hold about his teachings — if I may say I hold any views about anything whatever, which I hardly do.
His theories are certainly much more delightful than those they contest, and I for one would gladly believe them, but I cannot help feeling all the time that he is rather an imaginative and poetical writer than a reasoner, and that for his attractive assertions he does not adduce any proofs whatever. His use of the word ‘creation’ seems loose to me. Then, as to ‘conduct’. I fail to see how, if it is not mechanism, it can be other than Caprice, though he denies it (p. 50). And he says that Mechanism and Finalism (I agree with him as to Finalism) are only external views of our conduct.
‘Our conduct extends between them, and slips much further.’ Well, I hope it may, but he nowhere shows that it does. And again: ‘a mechanistic conception . . . treats the living as the inert. . . . Let us, on the contrary, trace a line of demarcation between the inert and the living (208).’ Well, let us, to our great pleasure, if we can see why we should introduce an inconsistent rupture of order into uniform and consistent laws of the same.
You will see how much I want to be a Bergsonian (indeed I have for many years). But I fear that his philosophy is, in the bulk, only our old friend Dualism in a new suit of clothes — an ingenious fancy without real foundation, and more complicated, and therefore less likely than the determinist fancy and others that he endeavours to overthrow.
You must not think me a hard-hearted rationalist for all this. Half my time (particularly when I write verse) I believe — in the modern use of the word — not only in things that Bergson does,
but in spectres, mysterious voices, intuitions, omens, dreams, haunted places, etc., etc.
But then, I do not believe in these in the old sense of belief any more for that; and in arguing against Bergsonism I have, of course, meant belief in its old sense when I aver myself incredulous.
Sincerely yours,
Thomas Hardy.1
1 A great part of this letter will be found in a slightly different form on pp. 369-70 of this volume. Both versions are printed in order to illustrate Hardy’s artistic inability to rest content with anything that he wrote until he had brought the expression as near to his thought as language would allow. He would, for instance, often go on revising his poems for his own satisfaction after their publication in book form. — F. E. H.
3
Max Gate, Dorchester, 16.3.1915.
Dear Dr. Saleeby,
My thanks for the revised form of The Longest Price of IVar, which I am reading.
I am returning, or shall be in a day or two, your volume of Bergson. It is most interesting reading, and one likes to give way to its views and assurances without criticizing them.
If, however, we ask for reasons and proof (which I don’t care to do) I am afraid we do not get them.
An ilan vital — by which I understand him to mean a sort of additional and spiritual force, beyond the merely unconscious push of life — the ‘will’ of other philosophers that propels growth and development — seems much less probable than single and simple determinism, or what he calls mechanism, because it is more complex: and where proof is impossible probability must be our guide. His partly mechanistic and partly creative theory seems to me clumsy and confused.
He speaks of ‘the enormous gap that separates even the lowest form of life from the inorganic world’. Here again it is more probable that organic and inorganic modulate into each other, one nature and law operating throughout. But the most fatal objection to his view of creation plus propulsion seems to me to lie in the existence of pain. If nature were creative she would have created painlessness, or be
in process of creating it — pain being the first thing we instinctively fly from. If on the other hand we cannot introduce into life what is not already there, and are bound to mere recombination of old materials, the persistence of pain is intelligible.
Sincerely yours,
Thomas Hardy.
APPENDIX III
Letters on ‘The Dynasts’
Max Gate, Dorchester, New Year’s Eve, 1907.
My dear Clodd,
I write a line to thank you for that nice little copy of Munro’s Lucretius, and to wish you a happy New Year. I am familiar with two translations of the poet, but not with this one, so the book is not wasted.
I have been thinking what a happy man you must be at this time of the year, in having to write your name 8000 times. Nobody wants me to write mine once!
In two or three days I shall have done with the proofs of Dynasts III. It is well that the business should be over, for I have been living in Wellington’s campaigns so much lately that, like George IV, I am almost positive that I took part in the battle of Waterloo, and have written of it from memory.
What new side of science are you writing about at present?
Yours sincerely,
Thomas Hardy.
Max Gate, 20:2:1908.
My dear Clodd,
I must send a line or two in answer to your letter. What you remind me of — the lyrical account of the fauna of Waterloo field on the eve of the battle is, curiously enough, the page (p. 282) that struck me, in looking back over th
e book, as being the most original in it. Though, of course, a thing may be original without being good. However, it does happen that (so far as I know) in the many treatments of Waterloo in literature, those particular personages who were present have never been alluded to before.
Yes: I left off on a note of hope. It was just as well that the Pities should have the last word, since, like Paradise Lost, The Dynasts proves nothing.
Always yours sincerely,
Thomas Hardy.
P.S. — The idea of the Unconscious Will becoming conscious with flux of time, is also new, I think, whatever it may be worth. At any rate I have never met with it anywhere. — T. H.
Max Gate, Dorchester, 28:8:1914.
My dear Clodd,
I fear we cannot take advantage of your kind invitation, and pay you a visit just now — much as in some respects we should like to. With the Germans (apparently) only a week from Paris, the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought. We shall hope to come when things look brighter.
Trifling incidents here bring home to us the condition of affairs not far off — as I daresay they do to you still more — sentries with gleaming bayonets at unexpected places as we motor along, the steady flow of soldiers through here to Weymouth, and their disappearance across the Channel in the silence of night, and the 1000 prisoners whom we get glimpses of through chinks, mark these fine days. The prisoners, they say, have already mustered enough broken English to say ‘Shoot Kaiser!’ and oblige us by playing ‘God Save the King’ on their concertinas and fiddles. Whether this is ‘meant sarcastic’, as Artemus Ward used to say, I cannot tell.
I was pleased to know that you were so comfortable, when I was picturing you in your shirt sleeves with a lot of other robust Alde- burghers digging a huge trench from Aldeburgh church to the top of those steps we go down to your house, streaming with sweat, and drinking pots of beer between the shovellings (English beer of course).